The Truth Teller - The Impimpi...Why Now?

The year I got sick

It has taken years of chronically and often life-threatening illnesses to strip away slowly at everything that I held dear in my life. And suddenly I was facing an adjustment disorder. I have my own psychology degrees, so it has been a case of healer, heal thyself.

Apart from ill-health, there has been enormous financial strain with added expenses which have made us fly kites under a carpet. It is not easy to start a new life at the age of 61 for my husband, starting from scratch in a country he had not lived in for over 20 years.

With what I thought was an amazing opportunity, I got an online computer job writing web content for the SEO of a pharmaceutical company – yes, writing about Viagra and all the generics for erectile dysfunction. No one else wanted the job, so I took it. I know one hell of a lot about impotency and soft and flaccid penises now. The remuneration was wonderful and for a month, we were starting to float. The following month, the person in charge dropped the ball and all the writers were fired, without pay and with immediate effect. After chasing the story down it was found that the pharmaceutical house was nothing but an online drug dealer. So that went out the door. Back to flying those kites under the carpet.

Then I got very sick. I was drowning in my own fluid. Discovery are amazing – they have come to the party and I am being home nursed with drips and all the paraphernalia I need. While I have been lying here, writing and thinking and pondering and reflecting over the last three weeks, I have had to take a good long hard look at what I want from life. Being one in ten million people with this disease does not make me special – it makes me a problem.

The crying and the grieving has been done. It is time to dry the tears and get on with the business of living. My spirit does not belong in this body. I am like the old lady struggling to move down the street, but her shadow is a young girl dancing with abandon.

I made the decision to share my life, every bit of it - the nice, the good, the ugly, the bad, the not too bad and the not too nice; leaving nothing out…telling the truth 100% of the time.

There are many reasons for my decisions. Some are:

Giving the abused child of my heart a voice
Allowing my soul to soar with freedom
Making myself transparent
To be truly authentic I must be brutally truthful about everything that has been, is and will be in my life
To allow those who have been damaged by part of my own past to come to terms with their healing as well
To show that child abuse affects a person their whole lives but that there is a way to become a survivor
To become a ferocious activist for prisoners - particularly for those who are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit
To inspire, help, encourage and provide my own brand of quotes for people to use to reflect on their own lives and to just have a good laugh
To do what I love and love what I do and that is to write – so the books will come, the blogs will come and … we shall see what the good Lord Himself has in store for me.

There will be those who will not like what I write, but that is their business and not mine. They do not have a gun pointed at their heads forcing them to read what I write. But I do know now that there will always be thousands more people who will appreciate truth rather than the bullshit that is spoken so often

I want my life to have meaning and I want to leave a legacy with my stories for my grandchildren to know who I was one day. What better way than to tell my own truthful stories.

I am now a freedom writer! And probably an impimpi as well!